India, Living and Dying
Article and photos by Matthew
Crompton (©) 2007-2015
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A boatman at dawn on the Ganges |
November 2007.
It is morning in Mamallapuram, a small
coastal town 40 minutes south of Chennai in the South Indian
state of Tamil Nadu. This morning, as I do each morning,
I walk along the beach before the cafes open, watching the
waves there mass, roll, and break into hissing white foam
gilded by the blinding horizontal sun. And this morning,
as happens every morning that I walk here, I pass the dead
dog lying at the edge of the surf.
The first day it was lying on its side,
in the little depression in the sand its body made, and
bloating, with a weird mortal pathetic snarl and its piebald
skin all wet as the water would shush up around it and then
wash back. There was a family bathing in the sea maybe ten
meters away, either oblivious to the dead dog slowly rotting
on the beach or unconcerned by it.
A day later, running in the sunrise
along the beach, I see that the dog has been pushed up by
the last night’s tide and now lies on its stomach, muzzle
buried in the sand as if it were very tired. I am surprised
to see that its eyes are still there, looking all mucid
and cloudy as a couple of crows hop around the carcass,
pecking at it in the sharp, spasmodic way crows do.
Everywhere around the fishermen are
gathering and mending their nets before they set out for
the day, laughing and talking beside the colorful little
boats that cluster on the shore, totally uninterested in
the body of the dog which is lying there mere feet away
from them, and sadly bloating.
Something about this business of the
dog is fascinating. Something about how naturally it is
regarded, lying there rotting comfortably on a tourist beach
and nobody batting an eye. Each day as it lies there people
splash in the surf nearby—children laughing, families
on holiday—and yet still the dog remains, looking so sad
with its muzzle pushed into the sand and its empty eyes.
It seems a strange and vivid thing to
my American sensibilities, which scream that death must
be kept apart, and sterilized, not left here to contaminate
the living with its bleak reminders. But here on the shore
in this tiny town in Tamil Nadu the dog lies undisturbed.
Nobody denies it, and no one has asked that it be removed
from view. And if the dog is a stark reminder of the reality
of death, it is a reminder that has been stripped of its
capacity to startle.
As I travel for the following weeks,
the calendar giving way to Thanksgiving and rolling onwards
toward Christmas, I talk to people. On the trains, on buses,
in the queues of temples, I open myself, talking the aimless
earnest and incessant talk of a confused 26-year-old seeker
to all and sundry who will lend their ears and minds to
hear. I speak to them about the dog, the death, and obliquely
of the fear of dying it sparks in me. I speak of the religions
of this place, the strange sense of living myth and legend,
the sense that an awakening here in this place is possible,
even as I live and breathe, and even as my living comes
implicit with its own defeated end.
I am reminded on the train from Jalgaon,
crossing the long lonely Indian night thru the interior
of Madhya Pradesh, by a man cradling his daughter on his
lap as she sleeps, that the most famous of the myths, the
one the westerners have lionized, originated in the northern
city to which I am headed, as a flight from the ever-present
reality of death.
The legend, of course, is well known:
a prince outside his palace cloister in what is now southern
Nepal happens upon an old man, a sick man, and a dead man,
and afflicted by these revelations of mortality sets out
across the eastern Indo-Gangetic plain, through the wilderness
and patchwork city-states of ancient India. For years the
historical Buddha wanders and practices austerities, seeking
liberation from the sickness, suffering, and death of the
human body. And while it’s well known that his travels eventually
led him to Sarnath, where he preached his first sermon of
Buddhist law, it is the where of Sarnath that usually
escapes notice.
Just miles from one of the oldest continually
inhabited places in the world, Sarnath was — and still
is—little more than a morning’s walk from the tourist
center known today as the city of Varanasi. In the Buddha’s
day the location was known as the eponymous capital of the
Kingdom of Kashi. So when the Buddha opened his mouth to
preach the first words of Buddhist dharma, it did
not happen in isolation, static as a museum frieze, but
in fact a mere stone’s throw from what was already one of
the most important religious centers of the ancient world.
That’s the part about the Buddha legend
people miss: that people came to Kashi to die. For Hindus,
Kashi—the city of the great god Shiva—was synonymous
with liberation, and dying within its precincts conferred
upon them absolute moksha—a final release from
the cycles of birth and suffering, dying, and disease. The
fortunate dead of the holy city were burned there on the
west bank of the Ganges in the final Hindu rites, consumed
by flames said to have already been burning there a thousand
years. The riverbanks were the heart of a thriving city
with a great economy of death, a place permeated and enriched
by mortality.
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Sunset on the ghats in
Varanasi. |
Hinduism, though, mediated its liberation
through a vast priestly caste, the Brahmins, and all such
priestly classes exact their price. Poor and surrounded
by the immense mortality of the city of Kashi, it is easy
to imagine how compelling the Buddha’s egalitarian gospel
of bodily liberation must have been received by people living
in that time and place in the world—their death so
plain all around them.
When I arrive in Varanasi on a late
December day more than 2,000 years later, there are scales
at the Ganges riverside near where I rent a squalid room
that still measure out the weight of wood to fuel the cremations,
with every last bite of flesh paid for precisely. I stand
there alone on the ghats on Christmas morning,
the heat of the cremation fires like a hot flush on my face
as my eyes sting with the smoke drifting up from the funeral
pyres just below me.
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Man washing himself along the
river Ganges in Varanasi. |
As I stand, I can so easily imagine
a figure—the Buddha—cut out of the indistinct shapes
the mind makes of legend, watching as I do this raw red
foot tumble out of the fire, charred bone at its edges,
to be tipped by outcastes back into the flames, watching
the skin peel from the charred and mottled skull; watching,
as I do, without romance and without mystery, what becomes
of what is human.
Perhaps there is another lesson to be
found here, though, in this impermanence without romance,
in the candidness of human perishing. Here on the banks
of the same gray Ganges, the ash from the burning dead settles
on my jacket and on the bare brown shoulders and shorn heads
of the Brahmins. Ash settles in the hair of the indifferent
boys talking on mobile phones, drifts over the kettles and
the tiny earthenware cups of the chai vendors,
and up into the air above the city. The air is alive already
this day with a hundred paper kites, their orange and red
and blue paper rustling as they dive and swoop and dip above
the boxy rooftops.
Below, in the narrow streets, the dead
are borne on bamboo litters in shrouds of gold and white
fabric, and draped in garlands of marigolds. The processions
with the dead pass by and the living move aside, and when
the dead have passed, the living go on living—buying fruit
or cigarettes, pursuing tourists, and doing wash.
And no one, I realize again looking
around me, no one is looking to escape or deny death here,
because death in this place is never far away. There on
the ghats with the smell of burning filling my
head I close my eyes and feel the sense of life swelling
within me to unbearable fullness.
Within the fullness rests a simple truth,
the kind you fight to avoid before realizing the peace it
brings: That my life will end, wholly incomplete. And yet
that that ending, that incompleteness,
makes the whole cycle, the dismal and luminous spiral of
events unified by my birth and death, a thing as rare and
precious and ephemeral as a dewdrop in a desert.
In the middle of that imperfect and
temporal temporary life, lived like all others in a war
between futility and beauty, I open my eyes and through
the tears see the heat-lines from the funeral fires make
distorted shapes of the boats floating on the slack gray
water of the Ganga.
There is only so much time.
Winner of the seventh annual Solas
Awards for Best Travel Writing, Matthew Crompton is
a writer, photographer and occasional metaphysician now
residing in Sydney after living previous lives in Seoul,
San Francisco and Cleveland. His travels have taken him
through all the worst hotels on five continents, putting
him on a first-name basis with all manner of mosquito-borne
illnesses and intestinal parasites. His writing and photographs
have been extensively published in the US, UK, Australia
and throughout Asia, and his stories, "Into the Hills" and "Camel
College" have appeared in "The Best Travel Writing" print
anthologies.
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